Ghost Wave - Chris Dixon [91]
I asked Skindog and Pete Mel. Both said part of it had to do with the mutual pushing of the wild-assed circle of friends they grew up with—a group of surfing hellions known as the Santa Cruz Ratpack. But that didn’t explain everything. “Sometimes I bust on, why am I doing this?” says Skindog. “Well, I enjoy it. Do you enjoy it to the point of dying? No, but I do enjoy it. So why do I keep doing it?”
Wherever the impulse comes from, Skindog and his lovely wife, Annoushka, are already seeing similar traits in their six-year-old daughter, Aianna, and towheaded two-year-old son, Koa—especially Koa. On the day we spoke, standing in their kitchen, Koa was sucking a bucktooth-shaped pacifier and hurling pieces of his model train at me. “Quit it!” Skinny yelled, scooping him up and giving him a big tummy raspberry. “The kid scares me,” he said in a conspiratorial tone. “He’s already stuck his hand in a stove vent and nearly pulled his finger off. Next day, he’s doing the same thing with his other hand. I watch him and say, ‘What’s wrong with that guy? Is he stupid, or programmed for it?’”
I think back to Brad Gerlach and his reckless, high-diving father and to the manic, driven competitive energy of Mike’s father, Bob. I tell Skinny, maybe Koa’s programmed for it, because maybe Dad is too.
In the late nineteenth century, Sigmund Freud was the first person to posit a genetic component to what we might call “thrill-seeking” behavior. He suggested that there were “torpid types,” who felt best at a low level of excitement, while “vivacious types” craved excitement. But it wasn’t until the 1960s that a curious young psychologist at the University of Delaware named Marvin Zuckerman took Freud’s ideas and put them under the microscope. He asked test subjects a litany of questions: Do you like to drink, gamble, or experiment with drugs? Does monogamy make you happy—or would you prefer multiple sex partners? Might you enjoy leaping out of an airplane “just for the thrill of it”? Around 17 percent of humans, he found, are drawn to risky, sensory-stimulating behavior like moths to a flame. They also tend to be less religious, laugh more, dominate social group settings, and love testing exotic foods.
Zuckerman coined a term. These people were high-sensation seekers (sometimes abbreviated HSS). In short, they’re prisoners, slaves, and addicts to adrenaline.
Zuckerman is quick to point out that sensation-seeking behavior runs along a complex continuum, and no two sensation seekers are alike. But when it comes to potentially deadly activities like big wave surfing, there are common threads. “Part of it goes with how you expect to feel in a situation,” he told me in a telephone interview. “Even the risk of dying. If you expect to feel very anxious, it’s not very pleasant to anticipate a sensation. But with the high-sensation seeker, the anticipated possible sensation outbalances the fear of dying.” When I asked Zuckerman about big wave surfing, specifically, he said there were real similarities between guys like Mike Parsons, Travis Pastrana, and a hellbent skydiver. “Even before they do something for the first time [such as landing a double jump, parachuting, or dropping into a massive wave], high-sensation seekers also tend to estimate a risk as lower than low-sensation seekers. After they’ve done it a few times and survived, the risk appraisal is lowered even further still. They feel confident they can handle a situation.”
A couple of decades back, Mark Foo famously said, “If you want to ride the ultimate wave, you have to be willing to pay the ultimate price.” Many dismissed Foo’s remark as glib, even cynical marketing hyperbole, but was it really hype? Really, Foo expressed a genuine truth that all his big wave surfing friends understood implicitly: A major component of the thrill that draws them is risking death. What